Rare Sherlock Holmes manuscript may fetch PS250,000

London, June 6 (ANI): A rare, complete manuscript of a Sherlock Holmes short story, written in Conan Doyle’s hand, is up for sale at the Antiquarian Book Fair in London, with a price tag of 250,000 pounds.

The book written in 1911 is a 28-page edition titled The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax.

The story follows the cocaine-snorting, pipe-smoking sleuth as he solves the case of a rich, unmarried aristocrat who has vanished on the continent and is later found in a secret section of an old woman’s coffin.

If sold, it will be the most expensive piece of Sherlock Holmes memorabilia.

Earlier the original manuscript of The Sign of Four was sold for 243,000 pounds at Sotheby’s in New York in 1996.

I think the price is justified, Times Online quoted Mark Hime, the Beverly Hills-based dealer who purchased the manuscript from an American businessman who had bought it at auction in the 1970s.

There isn’t another equal manuscript out there for less, or a better one for the same price, he added.

Last month a rare first edition of the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study In Scarlet, fetched 15,500 pounds at an auction after it was discovered in an Oxfam shop in Yorkshire. (ANI)